I hope my first post on the forums can help someone and give back some of the great information i have found here! I have been reading the forums for a while... finding ways to automate my house and now i would like to share my findings / project!

I had one requirement around automating my house... it needed to be cheap (I'm married with children )... after investigating various options i found all the commercial options out of my price range!..!... so I started to build my own.

I have created something i call HomeZone, its a cheap 320x240 touch screen i picked up from a local vendor for about 35chf which sits on top of an Ethermega from Freetronics $99AUD. The remote can control my lights using RemoteSwitch Library and some 315Mhz Learing relays... I can control the motion detection on my Foscam cameras using HTTP client (GET commands) + currently working on IR for my home theater and then the alarm.

In addition I have a Webserver running on the same Arduino which can also control everything the touchscreen can.... i know the code isn't great but i only got my first Arduino about 2 months ago ... i am learning to code and improving it slowly... anyway i thought i would share.. you can find all the details on my blog @ www.humpadilly.com I always share the code for my projects / schematics when i post about them... I hope it can help someone with their home automation project.

Did you have any problems with the ethernet socket fouling the underside of the touch screen?Also did you have any pin conflicts between the requirements and the screen?I'm looking to put a similar combination together but all the boards and shields I've looked at so far have these two incompatabilities and its putting me off a bit.

Yes the screen from boxtec.ch and the ethermega from freetronics didn't fit together well because of the Ethernet port.. I filed / sanded about 2mm of the lcd shield away around the Ethernet ports location and now it fits snug as a bug in a rug!

I will take a photo later tonight and post it for you.to see.

Nope no pin conflicts with the hardware I used... check out my page it links to the exact components I used.

By the way.. I have updated the code and moved away from a http web page based webserver to using JSON / DomoticHome / android app... if your interested I can just paste the updated code here as I have not had the.time to do a post on it at my blog....

I will have to teach my kids arduino and programming... this way I have projects completed faster!!I guess when the turn 3 I will have to start to teach them potty trading is the priority at the moment

although these pages are a bit out of data and have some conflicting information at present.

The immediate goal is to monitor various aspects of our motorhome such as the solar power system, truck body level, security cameras etc. I don't plan much control at present but things like water pumps are an obvious thing to play with.